via Geekdad
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Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Happy Birthday Photoshop!
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010More Hating on Fireworks, or, How I learned to stop worrying and love Photoshop I mean Illustrator I mean, o, crap.
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009So one of my most favoritest designers in the whole wide world, Mr Jon Hicks, wrote a big assed article about Fireworks recently. It was fantastic to see, as my frustrations with Photoshop and Illustrator have come to a boiling point. At my office, we’ve been considering giving Fireworks a try, so this was a great heads up. Additionally, for those of you who read the comments on our Adobe responds to Fireworks post, you’ll know alot of FW faithfuls have been extra pissed at this new release. I think Jon captures not only the Fireworks crowd’s frustration but that of the Photoshop and Illustrator ones as well, here:
The problem is, after submitting the 20th crash report of the day, I’ve lost faith that anyone ever sees them or acts upon them. Overall, it feels like Fireworks is at the point of no return – no hope of it ever being fixed or improved, only that it will get more bloated, buggy, non-native and expensive.
Now I’ve been reassured time and again that Adobe is listening. I don’t think “Listening” is the problem; the problem is focus and politics. See before the Macromedia/Adobe merger, you could legitimately point at Adobe and say, “hey, make a graphics editor specifically for screen graphics”, since neither Photoshop nor Illustrator were “meant” for it. Once Fireworks entered the mix though, they had an answer. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to be taking development of it seriously, pissing off those who want to see it flourish, and those who want to see it replaced by something better by not getting rid of it (like, a Photoshop / Illustrator hybrid).
Adobe seems more concerned developing next generation technology like Flash Catalyst which is cool ‘n all, but doesn’t get the job most designers are doing everyday done much faster or more reliably. I want to give Fireworks the ‘ol college try, but if it’s as unstable as everyone says, that’s pretty disheartening. Meanwhile, Photoshop is getting more and more bloated while not adding much to the screen design side of things, and Illustrator still can’t render a single bloody pixel. Adobe needs to reconsider what their workhorse solution is for screen graphics for professional designers, or more people are going to start taking the competition seriously.
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Flash problems? Don’t use it, duh.
Friday, June 26th, 2009John Welch of bynkii.com has a fun rant about Flash plugins and what some Adobe staff has recomended people do to handle the frequent browser crashes and slowness. Prepare to be appalled and entertained all at once.
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John Nack: Complex PSDs Survey
Sunday, February 8th, 2009John Nack has a post up on his blog asking for people to participate in a survey regarding how to manage highly complex PSDs. Some of the ideas he’s put forward include Layer Sorting, Symbols, Linked Files and Type Styles.
Read more and post your own ideas on his blog post here and be sure to take the super-short survey here.
via Subtraction.
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Single app upgrades from a version of Creative Suite
Thursday, January 15th, 2009Right after CS4 was released, we noticed alot of the same gripe flooding in: why can’t we upgrade a single application from an older version of Creative Suite? I counted 30+ for Photoshop alone and many others filed under General Bitching:
How about allowing us to upgrade portions of a collection instead of the whole thing. I want to only upgrade PHOTOSHOP every year and a half.
How about letting us upgrade Photoshop from a Suite Series without having to upgrade the whole frickin thing???
Why would you allow some to upgrade photoshop from elements when they paid $99 but someone who paid $1700 for creative suite has to upgrade the whole lot?
Originally we thought that this was possible, so after some digging online we decided to go straight to the source for some confirmation from product managers at Adobe. Today we got our response:
Yes, unfortunately this one is true. We are looking to see what solutions we can possibly provide to work around this issue.
If we hear any more on this, we’ll be sure to let everyone know. In the meantime, let’s do an informal poll: if you own an older version of Creative Suite, what apps would you upgrade?
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InDesign Bug Fix: Cmd+H in OS X Leopard
Tuesday, January 13th, 2009People using InDesign in Leopard will be pleased to know that there is now a fix for that pesky issue where InDesign cannot be hidden or unhidden. Simply upgrade OS X to 10.5.6, the latest version that was released on December 15th. The free software update should correct the issue for both CS3 and CS4 versions of InDesign.
A heads up is in order when upgrading to 10.5.6 though; there have been a couple reported problems.
Last but not least, many thanks to Michael Ninness (Senior Product Manager, InDesign) for writing in with this tip.
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Adobe responds to AIR gripes
Friday, December 12th, 2008
Robert Christensen, product manager for Adobe AIR, dropped us a line to let us know he’s responded to nearly all of the gripes listed for AIR in the replies. That’s alot responses folks! All applications should be so lucky. 
Here’s the full list of AIR gripes: http://dearadobe.com/top_rated_apps.php?a=AR. Just click on the Gripe ID numbers to see Rob’s responses.
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Adobe’s ‘just do it’ days
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008We’ve been emailing with Kevin Connor, V.P. Product Management of Professional Digital Imaging at Adobe and he shared with us a glimpse into how Adobe’s developers are working on improving their software. Kevin writes:
A number of product teams are starting to incorporate “just do it” days into their development cycle. The idea is that the entire engineering team will take a break from their normal feature work and pick off some small product enhancements that can be implemented in a day or less. We’ve always tried to squeeze in these things where we can, but scheduling some formal days to focus on these smaller user requests will hopefully give us some extra momentum in getting them done. Dear Adobe can be one of several sources of inspiration for what things to tackle on these days.
Personally, I think this is really exciting. Looking at the gripes submitted to Dear Adobe, this is mostly what people want. They’re not pining for crazy new features, but want a program that works logically, smoothly and consistently. Here’s hoping to see the benefits of these “just do it” days soon!
UPDATE (11-12-2008):
In a follow up email, Kevin also offers some ideas about what might be fixed in these ‘just do it’ days:
Generally, they’d be things that would never make it into our top-level marketing materials, but things that existing users would notice and appreciate—minor enhancements to how existing features function, rather than entirely new features. Of course, what can really be implemented in a day is also a function of how things are coded in the first place.
He goes on to provide some examples of some things that were changed in CS4 that would probably be well suited to one of their ‘just do it’ days:
Though we didn’t schedule formal “just do it” days for the CS4 development cycle, there are a number of changes in that release that would be typical of what we might tackle this way. Some examples include:
- Changed the default color of the Stroke layer effect to black (formerly red). Ideally we would have liked to make this sticky so that it would remember your last setting, but that actually would have taken more than a day’s work to change all of the logic, and we couldn’t spare that time.
- We made a bunch of shortcut-key changes. These included freeing up the Cmd-~ shortcut so that it would be available on the Mac for application switching, and adding single-key shortcuts for moving among frames in video clips.
- The new “Bird’s Eye View” feature wasn’t exactly a user request, but it falls into the category of something an engineer was able to implement serendipitously based on some other work he was doing. It wasn’t part of our original product plan. Basically, it allows you to hold down a shortcut key to instantly zoom out to see your full image, navigate to the portion you want to see, and then release the shortcut to instantly zoom back in.
- Save for Web now has improved options for exporting metadata (while maintaining copyright info), and also can convert to sRGB directly within the dialog.
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(Unofficial) Responses to Illustrator gripes
Friday, October 3rd, 2008All you Illustrator fans might be interested to see an article over on Real World Illustrator where a former product manager for Illustrator took some time and wrote up some responses to the top Illustrator gripes.
via: GraphicStart
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